Is Proxmox pricing for home users st $133/socket justified in 2025?

When the alternative is completely free and fully functional, yes.

If you're using proxmox in an environment where it provides value to your business, yes you should pay.

For home-gamers? Who the hell is even paying for a subscription? Why would you? As the OP points out, the only real benefit is the "production" package repos. You get the same or better support for free on forums and social media from the community of homelabbers who also aren't paying.

They can charge whatever they want for entry level support. It's still not for you, the free tier is.

We operate VMware and Proxmox environments at my workplace. The pricing for Proxmox is so significantly lower that it's essentially free, even if we were to purchase support for every host/socket (which we currently don’t).

I’m intrigued to see how they price the new Proxmox Datacenter Manager product [1]. One of the primary challenges in retiring our VMware environment has been the absence of centralized management.

Proxmox could charge us 50% or more than vSphere’s pricing, and we would still be willing to pay it. That’s how much our VMware bill has increased. We are not alone in this; virtually every VMware customer is seeking more affordable alternatives. Proxmox has an opportunity to generate substantial revenue if they can successfully license PDM for business customers.

Honestly, I doubt that Proxmox is even considering home users in terms of subscriptions and payments at the moment.

[1] https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/proxmox-datacenter-manager...

Yes. I want to toss them $ but i’m not paying that much!